I See You (Criminal Profiler #2) - Mary Burton Page 0,9

care what you put in your arm. I just want a time.”

Her eyes roved down her arm, and then, “Maybe about fifteen minutes after I checked in.”

“And you heard nothing?”

“No. Just the television, I swear. And I didn’t get that messed up.”

If that was true, that meant Jane Doe had been killed before midnight. He took the woman’s name and number and gave her his card.

Vaughan moved down the string of rooms, but each new occupant was less helpful than the last. He spoke to several working girls, gave them his card, and told them he wanted to figure out what had happened to the girl.

Homicide work was tedious, amounting to boots on the ground that led to small crumbs that might lead him to a killer. The forensic stuff would come in handy later in court, if the case made it that far. But his best chances of solving this murder fell within the first forty-eight hours. After that, the chances dropped by 90 percent.

His phone rang, and he tugged it from the cradle nestled beside his badge. Zoe Spencer’s name flashed on the screen.

They had met months ago at a Quantico training session sponsored by the FBI for local law enforcement. She had been lecturing on forensic art, and she’d worn a pencil skirt and black heels that had given him such a hard-on; he had not learned much.

He had approached her after the second week of classes, bribing her with coffee if she would assist him with a case, and she had agreed. Her assistance had helped solve the case, and basically one thing had led to another.

Their paths had not crossed for weeks until early summer, when Nikki McDonald had called in the Jane Doe find. He had called Spencer immediately.

“Agent Spencer. Any luck with my Jane Doe?” he asked.

“I can be in your office in an hour and give you the full story.”

“Can I have the CliffsNotes version?”

“Better to show you,” she said.

“Make it two hours. I’m at a homicide scene.”

“Understood. See you in two hours.”

After he ended the call, he knocked on motel room doors for another hour but discovered if there had been a witness, they weren’t talking.

When he had less than a half hour before his meeting with Spencer, he notified Officer Monroe he was headed back to the station, and then he texted his partner, Detective Cassidy Hughes, about this current case as well as the pending update on Jane Doe. Hughes replied quickly, informing him she would be tied up in court for at least another hour.

He slid behind the wheel of his car and turned on the engine and air-conditioning. As he pulled out of the lot, the motel room sign glinted in his rearview mirror. Already he felt as if he had let the dead girl down. If he got an ID, then he could search arrest records and last known associates. Jesus, there had to be someone out there who had known her.

He forced his mind to shift gears and focus on the Jane Doe Nikki McDonald had found in the storage unit early in the summer. When he and his partner had arrived on the scene, Nikki had already uploaded footage to her social media pages.

He’d asked her to hold off on any more posts, but when she’d realized her post had gone viral, she’d doubled down. He had posted a uniformed officer at the scene to keep curiosity seekers and crime junkies away.

Nikki’s posts had generated a couple of spots on local news, leading to more speculation about the victim’s identity. The pressure to solve the case had steadily built.

He and his partner had interviewed the owner of the unit, but she’d had no idea how the trunk had ended up in her space. There had been no prints on the trunk and no usable DNA in or on it. They had hit one dead end after another.

Now, as he drove toward the station, he hoped Spencer had identified the victim. The snag of traffic irritated him more than usual because he was anxious to hear what Spencer had to say. Fifteen minutes later, he walked through the front door of the police station.

The sergeant behind the desk, a bulldog of a man with a thick mop of gray hair, looked up. “That special agent just arrived. She’s in the conference room.”

Vaughan straightened his tie. “Thanks.”

“This about the head case?” the sergeant asked.

Dark humor might have offended some on the other side of the blue